Interesting recent article from LightReading: How Huawei and open RAN misfires hurt Ericsson, Nokia and telcos
Open RAN planning, Machiavelli-style
Despite offering words of encouragement to alternative RAN suppliers, telcos with brownfield networks have bought almost none of their products. Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, the big three kit vendors, still account for roughly three-quarters of the global market, according to Omdia's data, and their respective market shares have barely changed since the birth of "open RAN," a bid to cultivate new suppliers by ensuring one vendor's products can be joined easily to another's (not possible in a traditional RAN).
But while they have failed to grab market share, those suppliers have certainly provided competition against Ericsson and Nokia in tenders that would previously have been less contested. Mavenir, a US software company that has branched into making radios, is known to have responded to a major Vodafone tender for supposedly 170,000 basestations across Europe and Africa. Rakuten Symphony, an offshoot of the Japanese e-commerce company, has competed vigorously for business in North America. Other Asian suppliers have done likewise.
All this reinforces industry suspicion that telcos never intended to do major deals with smaller vendors. Their somewhat Machiavellian open RAN scheme, say critics, was to maintain pressure on their traditional vendors and drive down prices. Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, active in this market since the 4G era, now show up as the main open RAN winners. Without apparent shame or any sense of irony, AT&T has even marketed its decision to rip out Nokia and become almost solely reliant on Ericsson under the banner of open RAN.
AT&T's Ericsson deal is the most egregious example of what the industry now calls "single vendor open RAN." In this phenomenon, telcos demand compliance with open RAN specifications but take all products from the same vendor. Commercial arrangements are largely identical to those of a traditional RAN deal.
Ericsson, then, is now AT&T's sole provider of RAN software, service management and orchestration, a RAN intelligent controller (RIC) and a containers-as-a-service platform for that RAN. It is also down to supply most of the radios. Dell and Intel will contribute some IT hardware, but the only remaining opportunities for third parties are as developers of RIC applications or suppliers of radios in the few areas where AT&T has decided not to use Ericsson. Fujitsu, a longstanding Ericsson partner, is the only radio alternative AT&T has identified since announcing the deal nine months ago.
It made me realize that from the perspective of Huawei joining Open RAN Alliance AND at the same time making their hardware compatible with Open RAN software seem like a bad move to make for someone with their position on many markets and with their price to quality advantage (or maybe both price & quality advantage) because that would undermine their future negotiating position with the clients on the markets where they already dominate or where they will be considered. If their clients will be able to easily substitute one vendor’s component for another, Huawei would lose its strong negotiation position, and would open these markets for other competitors, so they may be forced to offer lower prices in the end.
From the same article:
An unnecessary technological distraction
Maintaining the competitive pressure on suppliers is instinctive behavior for any business. But after years of mergers between kit makers, the recent initiatives linked to supply chain diversity and open RAN have arguably backfired, leaving telcos in a precarious position, with less solid choice than before. Not only has open RAN, judging by Omdia's data on market shares, failed to produce new viable alternatives to Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, but it has also weakened the Nordic vendors as an additional source of pricing pressure and technological distraction that has nevertheless gobbled resources.
At a basic level, executives from Ericsson and Nokia have had to field questions from reporters, analysts and investors about open RAN's impact. In an industry that was already drowning in associations, they have had to commit resources to groups such as the O-RAN Alliance, the body in charge of specs, or face the charge they are unsupportive.
They have also had to invest in O-RAN compatibility that will have all the usefulness of the male nipple in a largely "single vendor open RAN" market. Incorporating new interfaces is not as straightforward as simply unlocking a door, as endless disputes about functional splits show. Ericsson, for instance, would rather build its radios with equalizers, which address interference, and its baseband products without them. But to be O-RAN compliant, it must put equalizers on both sides, even when a customer buys everything from Ericsson and the baseband equalizer is redundant.
It is a similar story for Nokia. Mismatched algorithms could affect the performance of massive MIMO, an advanced 5G technology, in multivendor networks, said Tommi Uitto, the head of its mobile networks business group, at the start of the year. "It can be done, but the performance is lesser, and some work is needed to make it feasible, make it practical, make it something that actually can be used in the field," he said. Yet this would all seem like wasted effort if the market dynamics do not change.
This supports one of the points we made earlier - that if Huawei is more advanced in some solutions it may be hard for them to make their hardware run on Open RAN compatible software and discussion on the standards between partners may take a lot of time which may be blocking or slowing Huawei new R&D efforts.
We also mentioned before that while there are calls from German telcos for a way to run Huawei hardware by Open RAN software provided by other companies, Huawei has not confirmed any efforts to do that. Also, the moment to join Open RAN to keep their hardware in the EU countries banning Huawei may have already passed, unless the rest of the EU countries will ban it as well. So far in the EU, only "eleven countries, fewer than half the 27 EU member states, have used legal powers to impose restrictions on telecom suppliers that are considered high-risk, such as Huawei and ZTE, for 5G network infrastructure"
At the same time, this is not a question "Will Huawei join the Open RAN before 1 October 2025?", even if my mind would like to substitute the harder question we were asked with that simpler one.
Actual formulation "This question will be resolved as “Yes” if Huawei or the O-RAN Alliance announce a collaboration between them on or before 1 October 2025. Such a collaboration might include, but is not limited to, Huawei joining the O-RAN Alliance, testing or developing equipment with O-RAN standards, or making financial or resource commitments. "
I believe these resolution criteria are broader and easier to satisfy with something like even announcement by Huawei that as they were asked by their clients they created a team to evaluate this idea of their hardware being controlled by Open RAN software and the team would likely conclude that it would lead to higher costs of development, higher prices, lower innovativeness, lower efficiency etc. I am not saying it is likely, but there is a room for a resolution of this question as "yes" with some announcements about some collaboration.
Some great forecasters whom I highly respect are currently much higher than the crowd (currently the mean - I believe it is the mean and not median - is 7%).
To name a few (in alphabetical order):
@404_NOT_FOUND - 12%
@Akkete - 13%
@cmeinel - 13%
@ctsats - 13%
@DimaKlenchin - 23%
@ScottEastman - 14%
@sebawi - 13%
I won't speak for them, but they are highly nuanced. Maybe their higher probabilities are a result of them seeing these possibilities of resolution as "yes" by other ways than announcement about Huawei joining Open RAN.
Why do you think you're right?
I am joining this question late, so I started with my own research first. It is always a time-consuming process, but there is something gratifying in challenging your own intuitions with asking questions and having a dialog with yourself: "Is that so? How do I know this? Let's check". Our mental models of the world are full of biases and inaccuracies introduced by popular culture, media, movies or opinionated pundits and talking heads. There is also outdated information and blind spots - knowledge gaps which we sometimes have creatively and unknowingly filled with fabricated information. Even our memory about things we think we know, cannot be fully trusted. It is great to update one's mind, replacing first impressions and long held assumptions or prejudice with information and data to create a more realistic, more accurate representation of reality. Never perfect but better. This is only my opinion, but I believe that cultivating the accuracy of our mental models, calibrating our judgment and practicing good thinking habits, is what makes a good forecaster.
Still, there is so much to learn, and we will never be able to remove all the blind spots and distortions, and some unknown unknowns. With limited time for each forecast, we need to prioritize some relevant questions over others, and hope that other forecasters will bring their knowledge, expertise and ideas, and that collectively we will create the map that is accurate enough to guide our predictive judgment well.
It was a pleasure to read many excellent comments, many of them by my fellow pro-forecasters (I added my upvotes).
I agree that the mortality rate for 85 y.o. male is a good starting point (around 10%). We need to adjust it down due to Khamenei's likely getting better health care than the average person his age, even in the richer western societies. However, sanctions on Iran would likely limit his access to the world's top medical professionals and some but not all cutting-edge medical therapies should the need for them arise. Should the need arise Russia could provide their medical experts, maybe China would too.
I agree with @gcahlik that the information about Khamenei's health is likely largely unreliable, but I think his health is very important here. I was thinking in particular about his lung damage from the 1981 assassination attempt - that may be important. Since COVID is deadlier for people his age, and especially people with preexisting lungs related problems. Some older COVID mortality rate data I found here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/#:~:text=in%20the%20tables.-,Age%20of%20Coronavirus%20Deaths,no%20fatalities,-*Death%20Rat shows for 80+ y.o. 21.9% of confirmed cases, and 14.8% of all cases - this was likely before vaccination was possible, this data from 2021 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9377390/#:~:text=52%2C423%2C114-,(20.5),-862.38) show 20.5% mortality rate for General U.S. Population 65+ y.o., still we do not know the details, but I assume any lung damage from bomb explosion is a risk factor, even if he was 42 at the time of this assassination attempt. I cannot find much more about his condition after the bomb exploded. The 2007 "Ali Khamenei" book by John Murphy says: "He was hospitalized for several months and suffered permanent damage to his arm, vocal cords, and lungs." Wikipedia page about this assassination attempt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ali_Khamenei#cite_note-Murphy-8:~:text=Portrait%20of%20Ali%20Khamenei%20(1981)%20in%20hospital%20Baharlo%2C%20Tehran) shows this image of Khamenei taken in the hospital -it does not look that bad... (but not sure when the photo was taken, but he still had bandages) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Ayatolla_Ali_Khamenei_in_Hospital_after_Assassination_Attempt_by_khamenei.ir03.jpg/800px-Ayatolla_Ali_Khamenei_in_Hospital_after_Assassination_Attempt_by_khamenei.ir03.jpg
We know that at least officially he got locally made COVID vaccine COVIran Barakat, as he banned import of vaccines made in the western countries, claiming they are "completely untrustworthy"
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-leader-gets-locally-made-coronavirus-vaccine-shot-2021-06-25/
He still could get these vaccines for himself, or at least some best Chinese or Russian vaccine, but if he really only got COVIran Barakat, then he might be less protected. At the same time he survived during the pandemic until now, so he likely is not that vulnerable to it as we may assume by his age and health consequences of assassination attempt.
I think that similar logic applies to his 2014 surgery for prostate cancer - if he survived that long it signals that it was early detection and that it was localized cancer or regional cancer and not metastatic prostate cancer as described below in the quote from this article: https://www.webmd.com/prostate-cancer/prostate-cancer-survival-rates-what-they-mean
I thought that it may also be good to find the video of some recent speech by him to get a feel about his general condition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5qQHO7jPkw - this is from three months ago - a speech for a Death Anniversary Of Ayatollah Khomeini
I've been wondering after Nasrallah death if something like that could happen to Khamenei, @TBall has voiced similar thought in their comment here: https://www.randforecastinginitiative.org/comments/141275
My initial reaction to this question would be "no", but this reaction is based on thinking about current reality, if we think about the future and how escalation has been progressing, I am not no longer so sure it is below 1%.
Some quotes from the Politico article: "Israel on ‘high alert’ for possible retaliation after killing of Hezbollah chief"
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-military-high-alert-after-killing-hezbollah-leader-hassan-nasrallah-lebanon-iran-hamas/
There were reports that after the attack in which Hezbollah chief was killed, Ali Khamenei was moved to the safer location, so they too don't consider such attack impossible:
For example, see here: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iranian-leader-khamenei-calls-muslims-confront-israel-2024-09-28/
Another article https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-airstrikes-28-september-2024-c4751957433ff944c4eb06027885a973 reports what Netanyahu said after the attack:
I think this claim may be closer to the truth than not, I believe that if the Israeli government would want Khamenei's death, then they are very capable and inventive and could succeed. However, would that make sense for Israel? Some say Netanyahu needs the war to continue (two articles with opposite views on that: https://www.vox.com/politics/369934/israel-gaza-protests-hostages-netanyahu-war-september https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/06/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-hostages-hamas/ - even if not, the mechanisms of escalation may at some point make assassination of Khamenei look to Israeli government like something worth consideration or even a logical next step.
There is also some threat from ISIS. As I wrote here in reply to @michalbod 's great comment here:
In my opinion, they are unlikely to be able to get him, they lack track record of successful attempts at high ranking well-guarded government officials, but they were able to do these coordinated attacks in Tehran on the Iranian Parliament and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/6/7/gunmen-attack-irans-parliament-khomeini-shrine (For me, it does not look like a super-sophisticated attack nor with a strong force, but still, they were capable of reaching these high-profile places - probably the security has been increased since then).
ISIS also claimed responsibility for this bomb attack in January this year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/04/iran-kerman-attack-islamic-state-suspicion-border-afghanistan-pakistan"
Why might you be wrong?